President Donald Trump made a claim Monday that the media “doesn’t want to report” on terrorist attacks involving Islamic radicals.
“Radical Islamic terrorists are determined to strike our homeland, as they did on 9/11, as they did from Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino and all across Europe,” Trump declared at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported, and in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it.”
Trump did not say why the media might not report on terrorist attacks but gave no examples of stories that went uncovered.
“They have their reasons,” he told the gathering. “And you understand that.”
A short time later, the White House provided a list of 78 attacks from September 2014 to December 2016 that officials claimed got short shrift from the news media.
A perusal of the archives revealed that NBC News covered 57 of the attacks on the list, which resulted in the deaths if 745 people — including the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015, which killed 130 people, left more than 400 others wounded and resulted in hundreds of stories.
By contrast, the 21 attacks NBC News did not cover were smaller incidents in places like Egypt, Bosnia or Bangladesh, resulting in the deaths of just eight people, total. In a number of these incidents the suspects were described only as “unidentified” or “unidentified ISIL” operatives.
Also on the White House list was another terrorist attack that was covered widely by both the U.S. and foreign media — the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, which killed 14 people.
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SOURCE: HALLIE JACKSON, ALEX JOHNSON and CORKY SIEMASZKO
NBC News
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